BIOLOGY 1A03 Lecture 11: The Genetic Code and Codons

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Biology
• Course: BIOLOGY 1A03
• Professor: Lovaye Kajiura

Document Summary

We have learned that the genetic information of a cell is contained in the dna and how transcription can create a copy of the genetic sequence of a gene. Transcription is an extremely valuable way of creating multiple copies of the gene and it can be further regulated by rna stability or compartmentalization. That said, we still have not made a protein. We have not taken the transcribed nucleotide code and translated it into another language - the language of proteins. Proteins are made from 20 different amino acids, but there are only four nucleotides in mrna: adenine (a), cytosine (c), guanine (g), and uracil (u). The manner in which researchers were able to decipher the genetic code that is contained in the dna blueprint and that is transcribed into mrna is actually a very interesting story. Shortly after the discovery of the structure of dna by james watson, francis crick and rosalind.